Happy 30th Birthday, Tetris!

My earliest memories of Tetris are of playing it on our NES system. My dad was the biggest fan (and the best at it) for a while. The TV and NES were in parents’ bedroom at the time, and I remember waking up early one weekend and peeking into their room and discovering my dad, still in his pajamas, playing Tetris quietly. It’s funny—the only time I remember my dad ever swearing was him muttering under his breath while playing Tetris. I can’t hear “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies” without picturing falling blocks.

Pretty soon, I was addicted, too. My brother and I competed constantly. Sure, other dropping-pieces games came along, like Dr. Mario, but I think the ubiquity of Tetris won out: you could play it on the Game Boy, on the PC. Heck, there were even some graphing calculators that played Tetris. In college, I got into fierce Tetris competitions with my roommates. I could tell when he was playing because the frantic clacking of keys had a different (and faster) rhythm than his typing. I even figured out how to hack the high score table—pretty simple, actually, since it was just a text file—and surprise him with scores that were leaps and bounds above his highest scores.

Tetris even played a part in my courtship. You laugh, but it’s true. I wooed my wife with, among other things, a copy of tetris.exe on a 3.5″ floppy disk. (Kids, ask your parents.)

Like countless others, I owe my ability to pack efficiently to time spent playing Tetris. I can make room in the fridge for one more container of leftovers or in the trunk of the car for one more suitcase, and we’ve always called it “tetris-ing” when I’m making those rearrangements.

I could go on, but I don’t need to. I play much less Tetris now than I used to—that iOS Tetris Blitz just makes me feel old, grumbling at all these newfangled features—but there will always be a soft spot in my heart for those falling blocks.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of this amazing puzzle game, here’s a video put together by Tetris. There are meetups happening all over the world, too, so check out the We All Fit Together website for more.